Durbar (37 page)

In this interview, her first ever, Sonia talked about how she met Rajiv in a restaurant in Cambridge and how it was love at first sight for both of them. She spoke of how she had not been afraid to come to India because ‘when you’re in love you cannot be afraid’. When she was asked what she had learned from Mrs Gandhi in the twenty years she had lived in the house as a daughter-in-law she said, ‘I learned to fast once a week.’

It was this that everyone in the office was laughing about the day the magazine appeared with Rajiv and Sonia, wreathed in happy smiles, on the cover. My colleagues found Sonia’s innocent admission that all she had learned from ‘one of the most powerful women in the world’ was to fast once a week hugely entertaining. I defended her by pointing out that in most of those twenty years she and her husband had stayed as far away as possible from politics. But my colleagues were unconvinced and put me through a virtual inquisition. Did she read books? What were her interests? Did she speak Hindi? Did she like India? Why had she not become an Indian citizen until 1983? What were her connections with Maruti, Sanjay Gandhi’s automobile company that never produced a single car? There was hostility in their questions and it was the first time I realized that Sonia, because she was a foreigner, could be a liability for our new prime minister.

After the interview to the Hindi magazine appeared the pressure on me to try and get Akbar the next interview became intense. I needed the job I had with the
Telegraph
because I was bringing up Aatish on what I
earned from it. My mother paid the rent for my barsati but was not ready to pay for anything else. I made ends meet by borrowing from either Vasu or my sister towards the end of every month and when Aatish’s clothes did not come from Sonia they usually came from his cousins, who were twins and, luckily, just two years older.

Akbar probably did not realize how much I depended on what I earned from the job he had so generously given me but Sonia did. She went out of her way to persuade whoever was in charge of the prime minister’s media relations to allow Akbar to do the first political interview with Rajiv. When she finally succeeded she rang me late one evening to say that the interview had been fixed and she wanted me to give Akbar the news so that it would appear as if it was my efforts that had got him the interview. She said that Akbar should get to Raipur the next day so that he could fly back to Delhi with Rajiv and do the interview then. I remember thinking even as I passed on the news that Raipur was too far away for him to be able to get there by the following day but somehow Akbar managed, and when he returned to Delhi he had become Rajiv Gandhi’s most ardent devotee.

I remember walking into the office soon after Akbar returned to find him in the middle of a dissertation on the virtues of Rajiv Gandhi. He looked at me, and had the grace to look embarrassed for a moment, but then he went on about why he believed that Rajiv was likely to be the best prime minister that India could possibly have. Behind his back there was much mirth and merriment in the office over the transformation that had come over him and someone with a ‘reliable source’ in high places reported that Mani Shankar Aiyar, who handled Rajiv’s relations with the media, was wandering about rubbing his hands in glee, saying, ‘One interview was all it took to have the great rebel editor in our pocket.’

Akbar treated assignments as if they were rewards to be handed out for what he considered ‘good’ behaviour. So when he told me that I should prepare to go to Pakistan to do a story on the aftermath of a referendum that Zia-ul-Haq had just held to legitimize his ‘democratic’ credentials I was not sure if he was sending me because he thought I would do a good job or as a reward for arranging the interview. The referendum was so obviously a fraudulent attempt by Zia to prove that he was not a hated military dictator that it could easily have been told from India. It was clear from reports in the Indian newspapers that the question people
were asked was phrased in a way that would force them to say ‘yes’ to Zia’s rule. If there were not enough ‘yes’ votes they would be managed. But I had not been to Pakistan in five years and wanted to discover the extent to which secessionist groups in Punjab were being backed by the Pakistani government.

So, within weeks of Rajiv becoming prime minister I found myself on a plane to Lahore on a winter afternoon. It was so cold in Delhi that I wore leather pants and a thick jacket which, I realized from the stares that my attire drew at Lahore airport, was wholly inappropriate attire in Zia’s Islamized country. Not having been here since the process of Islamization began I had no idea how much Pakistan had changed but sensed the difference from the moment I landed in Lahore. It was not just from the way my Western clothes attracted attention but from a prayer room that I noticed for the first time at the airport and from the way women were more demurely dressed and men more bearded.

In Lahore I met old friends, spent long evenings talking about dictatorship and democracy, heard that Salmaan Taseer was in jail, and before heading off to Islamabad drove to Nankana Sahib, where one of the most revered gurudwaras in the Sikh religion commemorates the birthplace of the founder of the Sikh religion, Guru Nanak.

My visit to Nankana Sahib was technically illegal since my visa allowed me to go only to Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, but I thought it was worth taking the risk because I had heard that this was where young Sikh boys had gone after the attack on the Golden Temple. Some were former members of Bhindranwale’s army and others had crossed the border simply to escape the ‘mopping up operations’ that the Indian Army had conducted in Punjab’s villages after Operation Blue Star. On this visit to Nankana Sahib I discovered two things. First, that the village in which the historic gurudwara exists was the ancestral village of my grandmother. She was a Mann from Mannanwala, and the grubby little village we drove through on the way to the gurudwara turned out to be the very same Mannanwala. I found this out by accident when my Pakistani driver stopped in the crowded bazaar to ask the name of the village. After Partition my grandmother had been so reluctant to talk about the country she was forced to leave that she had told me very little about what it was like, but she had proudly mentioned the name of her ancestral village. Since I was in the village illegally and did not want to draw attention to
myself by seeking out my grandmother’s family home, we drove straight through the village to the Nankana Sahib gurudwara. Later, when I told her I had driven through Mannanwala by accident on my way to Nankana Sahib, she asked me if I had gone to her childhood home and was very disappointed that I had not made the effort.

When we got to the temple I discovered, through discreet inquiries over tea with a very frightened Indian priest, that a large number of Sikh youths had indeed come here six months earlier and had all been taken to Faisalabad Jail. This puzzled me at the time but some months later in Amritsar, I found out from a senior police officer that they had caught a group of Sikh terrorists who claimed they had been trained to use automatic weapons and make bombs by Pakistani army officers in Faisalabad Jail.

When I got to Islamabad I managed to get a short interview with the military dictator himself. It was my first and last meeting with Zia-ul-Haq and I have to say that I found him utterly repellant. With his greased down, badly dyed black hair and his permanent smile under his caterpillar-like moustache he looked as if he were a clown playing a role. Except, he was no clown. He had been responsible for executing a legally elected prime minister and at the time I met him was in the process of building the religious schools and Islamist institutions that would turn Pakistan into the epicentre of jihadi terrorism it became twenty years later.

I came back to Delhi to find that while I was in Pakistan the inquiry into Mrs Gandhi’s assassination had begun and had taken a most peculiar turn. The city was filled with rumours that R.K. Dhawan, Mrs Gandhi’s former stenographer who had risen to become her most trusted political aide, was about to be arrested. This was because the judge inquiring into the prime minister’s assassination had apparently concluded that ‘the needle of suspicion’ pointed towards the man who had been by her side all his life and was literally standing beside her when she was killed. It sounded like a completely bizarre plot since nobody could have had less motive to kill Mrs Gandhi than Dhawan. It was from her that he derived his enormous powers. But since all the newspapers I read on the morning after I returned from Pakistan hinted at Dhawan’s imminent arrest I decided to pay him a visit.

He lived in Golf Links, five minutes from my barsati but I decided to walk to his house not because he was a neighbour but because I worked out that if he were under surveillance, which he would most certainly be,
I would draw less suspicion to myself if I walked than if I drove up at his gate. A mysterious woman arriving at his home on foot would be harder to identify than one arriving in a car with number plates that could be tracked.

It was a rainy morning and as I walked I glanced backward from under my umbrella to see if I was being followed. A tactic that would have been more useful if I had used it on my way home as I was to find out later that afternoon. R.K. Dhawan came from a Punjabi refugee family that fled to Delhi in 1947 to escape the violence in the newly created Islamic republic next door. I knew from people who had known him since those early days that the family was so poor that as a young boy he was put to work supplementing the family income by selling trinkets on the pavements of Connaught Place. He always denied this and liked to say, like most refugees from Pakistan, that he came from a rich, landed family in Punjab. He must have known that nobody believed his story but he was too powerful for anyone to challenge him even if his incredible rise from humble stenographer to huge riches and great power was always whispered about behind his back.

He was introduced to Mrs Gandhi by his uncle, Yashpal Kapoor, who like Dhawan had begun his career as a stenographer in the prime minister’s office and rose to dizzying heights of political power under Mrs Gandhi’s patronage. After Kapoor was implicated in the Allahabad High Court judgement that went against Mrs Gandhi in 1975 he faded away, but Dhawan went from strength to strength. He became Mrs Gandhi’s gatekeeper, as I had already discovered from my visit to the Sheikha Fatima’s palace in Abu Dhabi. Rumour had it that he was the kind of gatekeeper who did not let anybody pass without extracting a toll and that businessmen had given him so many Mont Blanc pens and Rolex watches that he could have opened a shop. With me he had always been helpful and friendly in a completely toll-free way.

That morning I was so worried about being followed that in a silly attempt to confuse hidden spies I stopped a couple of houses away from Dhawan’s when I got to the square in which he lived. When I was sure there was nobody watching I went up to his door and rang the bell. Normally even on a rainy day like this his small garden would be crowded with petitioners, power brokers and politicians. That morning it was deserted. Dhawan answered the door himself. He had a cigarette in his hand and looked as if he had not slept all night. His dyed black hair was uncombed,
and he looked frightened. When he saw me he tried to smile but gave up and ushered me in with an anxious look.

He led me into a drawing room that could have been a shrine to Mrs Gandhi. There were pictures of her everywhere. An enormous portrait of her covered the main wall and had a garland of fresh marigold flowers hanging on it and a small silver tray with incense below. On every table in the room there were pictures of her. Some in silver frames, and some laminated and standing stiffly on their own. Many had Dhawan in them, always deferential, always at her side, with an expression of utter devotion on his face. He saw me looking at the pictures and said, ‘Can you believe that they think I did it?’

This is how I remember the conversation that followed.

‘How have they come up with such a bizarre theory?’ I asked.

‘I wish I knew. All I know is that a few days ago I was called in by the inquiry commission to answer a few questions and now the papers are reporting that I was involved…’

‘What sort of questions did they ask?’

‘They wanted to know if I had asked for Beant Singh to be brought into the inner security circle and they asked me what I had seen…that day, the day she was killed.’

‘Did you? Did you ask for Beant Singh to be brought back?’

‘Yes. I mean, I could have. I had never seen him before. I didn’t know that he was behaving strangely or anything like that because I have nothing to do with security. But it’s possible that someone put his name up to me and I signed something.’

‘On the day she was killed…that morning, the first reports said there had been three killers. Did you see a third man?’

‘I didn’t see anything,’ he said wearily, ‘it happened so quickly, one minute she was standing there next to me, alive and chatting away, and the next moment she was lying on the ground…bleeding. I can barely remember what happened after this. I must have been in shock because it wasn’t till after other people rushed up that I realized what had happened.’ His voice trailed off and he looked down sadly at the cigarette in his hand.

‘Do you have any idea why they would be targeting you?’

‘None.’

‘There have been rumours from the start that the conspiracy is larger than it seems.’

‘I know nothing about these rumours and I know nothing about a conspiracy if there is one.’

‘Then why are they going for you? Do you have enemies in the new government who might be trying to get rid of you?’

‘In politics there are always enemies. You know that… Sorry, I forgot to ask if you would like something to drink. Would you like some tea?’